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From the Skin Artist, Always a Free Makeover

FOR Steve Moss, an artist, software is a matter of substance and style. Mr. Moss is one of thousands of people online who are creating and freely distributing skins, the graphical interfaces that act as both the face and the control panel of a computer program. Rather than settling for manufacturers' often mundane built-in visuals, they make and trade their own.

Inspired by his father's old cassette deck, Mr. Moss, a 23-year-old graphic designer in Worcester, Mass., wanted to apply the simplicity of what he called this ''nostalgic technology'' to the popular music player software Winamp. The result was Steel This Amp, a homemade skin that could be installed to replace Winamp's default black face with the brushed aluminum knobs of a retro stereo system.

Like most skin makers, Mr. Moss made his work available free on the Internet. ''It's functional art that I can share with others,'' he said. More than 650,000 people have downloaded Mr. Moss's skin from the Winamp home page.

Skins are not only about art, however. They are also about commerce, in that user-created skins are essential to the success of media players like Winamp and RealPlayer, instant messaging programs and computer games.

The skin community provides free marketing, said Ann Burkart, a spokeswoman for Nullsoft, which created Winamp before being acquired by America Online. ''People like to show off their work,'' she said, and the trading of skins helps spread the word about the software too.

Winamp 3.0, a new version of the software, is to be released this spring and is being designed to accommodate skin makers' sophisticated demands by allowing far more customization.

''This kind of customization is a huge factor in driving product use,'' said Justin Hutchinson, the product manager for RealPlayer. More than 15 million skins have been created for the RealPlayer, Mr. Hutchinson said. ''We're getting into a world where one size doesn't fit all,'' he said, ''and one of the great benefits of technology is having the experience tailored to you.''

The culture and industry of skin making arose from the interaction of passionate members of the computer-game underground. A game character evolves from a model -- a kind of wire-frame skeleton -- that is wrapped with artistic details, or skin.

Players began experimenting with ways of changing characters in 1992, when fans of the shoot-'em-up game Wolfenstein 3-D by Id Software, hacked into the code to replace the game's Nazi figures with Barney, the purple dinosaur.

''People figured out how to do all this with no help from us,'' said John Carmack, Id's lead programmer.

''We looked at this and said this is neat, this is good, we like this,'' he recalled. ''We'd like to try and nurture this.''

The company programmed future games, including Doom and Quake, to make it easier for players to create artwork and insert it into the published game.

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Many other games, including The Sims and the multiplayer first-person shooter Unreal Tournament, have Web sites devoted to user-created skins. Players swap skins of The Incredible Hulk or Rambo or even playable skins of themselves. Some companies, including Avatar-Me and 3Q, are marketing technologies that allow a player to impose his own photographic likeness on a game character.

Although designing game skins is a hobby for most creators, some, like Brian Jones of Dallas, land full-time jobs. After creating skins for the game Quake III Arena, Mr. Jones, a 25-year-old former schoolteacher, was hired by the game developer Ritual. ''To see a piece of my art running around a game is much more fulfilling than creating a traditional piece of artwork,'' he said.

Utility and entertainment programs also have skins (each skin is technically known as a GUI, pronounced like gooey, for the graphical user interface pioneered by SRI International and Xerox PARC in the 1970's). Such visual devices allow people to interact with programs in an intuitive way as opposed to dealing with command languages in plain text. With Windows and the Web, it is now a GUI world, with virtually every program brimming with eye candy.

Microsoft entered the fray by including desktop themes in Windows 95 that allowed users to not only create customized GUI's but also to add novelties like desktop wallpaper. No product, however, has been skinned quite as Winamp has. Developed by and for the digital music underground, Winamp tapped much the same community that computer games did. Not surprisingly, it did not take long for a fan to hack the code so that Winamp's default GUI could be replaced. Being hackers themselves, Winamp's creators were sympathetic and decided to ''embrace this trend,'' as Ms. Burkhart put it.

Winamp now has a staff of five reviewers who evaluate skins to be featured at the software's official site (www.winamp .com), the hub for collectors. More than 46,000 skins are available, ranging from Jennifer Lopez tributes to abstract art. Ms. Burkart credits the skinning community with increasing downloads of Winamp to more than 150 million since it was released.

Winamp is not the only company to discover the power of this market. Movie companies and record labels routinely commission artists from the Internet to create promotional skins for films like ''Blow'' and ''Frequency'' and music artists like U2, Britney Spears and 'N Sync.

RealPlayer held a contest to see who could create the best skin for the band Foo Fighters. The winner was flown to Las Vegas to see a live performance.

Both Real and Winamp provide skin-making tools and tutorials on their Web sites, and the coming version of Winamp promises to be the most skin-friendly player yet. While skin makers have been confined to creating skins that match up to the default player's rectangular specifications, Winamp 3 will allow skin makers to create all kinds of free-form shapes and sizes.

The message boards on Winamp's home page are filled with wish lists of features that users want included in the final product. But Mr. Moss said he will miss some of the constraints of the old Winamp.

''It's been an interesting challenge,'' he said. ''If you're stuck in this rigid format and it seems like there's not much you can do with it, the question is, how far can you push it? How can you make it feel like you're not stuck?''